On 27 November 1895, Alfred Nobel signed his last will and testament, giving the largest share of his fortune amounting to more than SEK 31 million(today approximately SEK 1,702 million) to a series of prizes in five subjects. The income from Alfred Noble’s investments was to be “distributed annually in the form of prizes to those who during the preceding year have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.“
Alfred Nobel , the inventor of dynamite may have been inspired to create the Nobel Prize after a premature obituary in a French newspaper called him a “merchant of death.”
The Nobel Prize (Swedish: Nobelpriset) was first awarded in 1901 for the following five subjects: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace. Nobel died on December 10, 1896. The formal awards ceremony is held in Stockholm each year on the anniversary of his death. The first awards show took place on December 10, 1901.
In 1968, a sixth award, The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is added by the Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s Central Bank).
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway and the rest of the Nobel Prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden.
The individuals and organizations awarded a Nobel Prize are called Nobel Laureates. The word “Laureate” refers to being signified by the laurel wreath.
Between 1901 and 2015, the Nobel Prize and Prize in Economic Sciences have been awarded 573 times to 900 Nobel Laureates (874 individuals and 26 organizations). Of them, women have been awarded 49 times. The Nobel Prize amount for 2015 is set at Swedish kronor (SEK) 8.0 million per full Nobel Prize.
Leonid Hurwicz was 90 years old when he was awarded the Prize in Economic Sciences (one-third of the Prize in Economics) and therefore the oldest Laureate ever. Malala Yousafzai became the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. The 17 year old girl is joint recipient of the prize with Indian activist Kailash Satyarthi. At 87 years of age, in 2007, writer Doris Lessing became the oldest woman Laureate (Literature).
Linus Pauling is the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes – the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize.
The Curie family is a Nobel Prize machine, winning five:
- Pierre and Marie (Physics in 1901),
- Marie solo (Chemistry in 1911),
- Daughter Irene and her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie (Chemistry in 1935)
- Henry Labouisse, who was married to Pierre and Marie’s daughter Eve, accepted on behalf of UNICEF in 1965.
Nobel Laureates you must know:
Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Elie Wiesel, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Jimmy Carter, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Pierre & Marie Curie, Max Planck and Albert Einstein.
Big names who never won:
Dmitri Mendeleev, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Henrik Ibsen, Joan Robinson, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Jules-Henri Poincaré, Raymond Damadian and Mahatma Gandhi.
The top five countries with the most Nobel laureates are:
- the United States
- the United Kingdom
- Germany
- France
- Sweden
Two Nobel Laureates who voluntarily declined the Prize:
* Jean-Paul Sartre (Literature in 1964)
* Le Duc Tho, (Peace Prize in 1973 )
Nobel Prize facts about Indian Citizens
First Indian Nobel price winner (also Asia) – Rabindhranath Tagore (Literature in 1913)
First Indian Nobel price winner for peace – Mother Teresa (1979)
First Indian to won Nobel price in the field of Physics (1930) – Sir C.V. Raman
